Everyone knows who Stephen Hawiking is, right? He is an extremely disabled British phycisist. Likely the smartest human alive. He rivals Einstein in his theories and quest for Grand Unification in Physics. I do not know if there is a Grand Unified between the Weak and Strong and Electromagnetic and Gavity forces. The search for the famous Higgs boson is related to the Unification theory.
However, the UK newspaper The Guardian, interviewed Professor Hawking and what he said is truly shocking.
He said that God and belief in an afterlife is a "fairy story".
If so, what does it matter if I kill myself? It would actually benefit the earth, having one less human.
No, I cannot accept this. The Universe just didn't happen. What happened before the Big Bang? And if it is eternal and cyclical, there had to be a beginning somewhere.
I do not believe the Genesis story. The earth formed over the course of billions of years. The sun just didn't spontaneously appear. We see stars being born all over space. Look up the Orion Nebula if you want to see that. Look up the star Folmahaut to see its dust disk from which planets form.
Testing done on asteroid material, meteorites, moon rocks, and comet particles captired by Stardust, show that the Solar System is 4.5 billion years old. It has another 4 or so billion years until the Sun bloats, startintg the slow death common to all stars its size.
Nothing here is eternal. Nothing really matters in the light of such knowledge.
I believe in God. My faith is that everything makes sense somehow. I do not know why we have the problems we do. It is human failures that led us to the problems we have. Communism, greed, apathy, consumerism, all of it, they are human failures.
If you study anthropology, then you see that we have not been here for very long. Homo sapiens have been around a fraction of the time Homo erectus was.
All other hominids are extinct. What does that tell you? Maybe our path away from apelike ancestors is a rocky one.
We exist only because nothing bad like an airbourne H1N1 influenza has not evolved. Or because a huge asterioid, or worse, a comet, has not hit the earth. Or because there has not been a stratovolcano like Yellowstone eruption in a long time.
There is evidence that the Toba eruption 30,000 years ago almost wiped humans off the face of the earth. DNA science proves that something did. We are all not even a fraction of a difference in DNA. Just enough to be different in skin and eyes and height and hair and build, and tolerances. These are all familial traits.
The first true human came about in an Ice Age. It is not even clear that he or she lived in the Pleistocene, we are Holocene creatures.
I muddle through a daily sense of shame, self-depreciation, and anxiety. Nothing can trigger my anxiety, it comes on its own.
If Stephen Hawking is right, then nothing matters.
But I do not and cannot believe that.
I believe in angels, I believe in Jesus. I believe in Salvation. I believe that this will all work out.
But be clear, Atenism possibly influenced ancient Jewish people, the people who wrote the Old Testament. Aten was a sun god worshipped by the Pharoh Amenhotep IV, who changed his name to Akhenaten. This created a huge dischord in Ancient Egypt and he became the most reviled of all ancient kings.
The idea of the Sun giving us life is a beautiful expression of a basic truth. We would not be here without the Sun.
The true story may never be known.
You can see the interview at http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/may/15/stephen-hawking-interview-there-is-no-heaven
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